Been trying to convert my friends since 1998.
I think console gaming hit the top of the curve years ago. Sure profits are bigger numbers, but inflation has halved the spending power of a dollar and it’s really hard to tell what’s worth more anymore. With that kind of uncertainty, it’s hard to declare what we’re experiencing now as surprising. They have had consoles on life support for at least 20 years now. Originally you needed the console, game, and a data hookup ( phone line) at most. Now you have to buy the 3rd revision of the console, have the gold subscription, make sure you’re buying the remastered version of the game you want, have an account with the publisher, ads the whole way, do i need to go on? It’s crazy we don’t stop and look at where we have gotten. Instead we’re like, but what if we added AI to this mix, that will fix it! And the cycle continues.
Meanwhile; Valve is literally drowning in money - they have to run sales so the inflow is slower - to clear away all the money. You don’t even need a PC anymore to play. Their 300$ handheld is as powerful as a 700$ rip-off laptop from what used to be a trustworthy brand. We may live in a capitalist genocidist technological hellscape, but at least Valve never broke. I’m actually happy HL3 never came out.
never came out
Seen the news lately?
After getting a Steam Deck my Switch is just collecting dust and that even though I would still like to play on it since it’s a lot lighter and more portable. Unfortunately it’s just a horrible deal to buy games locked to one platform at a higher price than their PC counterpart without getting any of the benefits (modding, free cloud saves across devices).
I’m only willing to buy the switch version if I really want to support the developers e.g. Celeste or Stardew Valley.
Hell, I use my Legion Go to stream from my desktop to my TV more than I boot up the game console attached to the TV. Even my wife, very vaguely a gamer, prefers the PC. She’s even a bit of a keyboard snob these days.
I mean, nowadays consoles are just a PC with glasses and a moustache… It’d be great if we moved away from physical consoles and more towards digital platforms so that the gaming industry is less fragmented.
Basically officially supported and updated roms/emulators. Or just skip that and make Nintendo and such something akin to Steam.
You’ll pry my physical devices from my cold dead hands.
I no longer have a computer, desk or lap, with a physical media drive. I have a plug in dvd-rom and a plug in 3.5" floppy drive so I can still(before the inevitable rot happens) use the hard copies of…every game I’ve ever owned worth keeping…I need to recap my ps1 and SNES…hmm
When consoles went online that was pretty much it for me. They had been cheaper and easier casual gaming thing but that kinda disapeared. The switch had something since you got the gaming on the go thing but the steamdeck is the thing for me now and I doubt I will go back as it is the only thing to bring me back to something like a console.
